Building Attractive Landing Pages

What’s new in Open Social?

It doesn’t matter what kind of product, service, or community you’re running, every website benefits from well-designed landing pages. Once you’ve done all the hard work to get members to sign up for your community, the next big step is to encourage action and convert them into active members. And the best way to do that is with our landing pages feature.

This feature is our pro-tip! Landing pages can become the heart and soul of your community. Since they’re too critical to sweep under the rug, let’s take a look at how you can use them properly in Open Social.

Landing page flexibility is key

Let’s start with a simple description of a landing page:

Landing pages are solely optimized to deliver a specific content goal or call-to-action that converts visitors into customers (or active members).

Web pages and other areas of your community are designed to be the structure of your website. These pages inform users and provide a place for action (such as groups, discussions, stream). Landing pages, on the other hand, have a specific purpose and leads users to the action.

Why should you use landing pages instead of regular pages? We’ve found from experience that landing pages offer:

Flexibility. Landing pages offer a lot of flexibility in terms of setting up your community. For example, you can create different homepages for anonymous users and logged-in users. You can shape each call-to-action differently, depending on your audience.

Conversion and promotion. These pages provide the fuel for other parts of your community. Use landing pages to highlight popular groups, discussions, and topics. Or you can even highlight members for outstanding contributions. You can lead members to these pages from both inside (welcome page or groups) and outside your community (social media or Adwords).

Visual attractiveness. Landing pages are accompanied by large, attractive images and an easy-to-follow layout. This makes it ideal for promoting a cool event to connect your members, or using it as a homepage to make users feel welcome. They are designed to attract attention and make information easy to find.

Here’s how it works

So, now you understand what landing pages are and why you absolutely need them. But how do they work in Open Social?

Content and site managers use this feature to create visually attractive pages by choosing, ordering, and configuring pre-made sections. It’s that simple! They are also very flexible in terms of title, visibility, URL alias, publishing status, and the content sections. You can find an example here.

The key components of a landing page include:

Hero: this section consists of a full-width image, a title, a subtitle, and two buttons. It’s used to give a first impression of the site or page.
Call-to-Action buttons: Use these buttons to encourage your members to take a specific action. Draw attention to the most popular groups or a current event.
Introduction: this section consists of a title, text area, and a link. It can be used to introduce the site or page.
Featured: this section is where topics, events, groups, members, basic and book pages and other landing pages can be featured.
Block: this section consists of two parts. On the left, you can display the latest community activities. On the right part, you can choose to feature the latest topics, groups, users, or activity overview.

Our resource center has various explanations about the know-how and uses of landing pages. We even have a few tutorial videos to help you make the most of this feature! Learn how to reorder sections or how to add a section in between others. We also explain how you can add a landing page as a menu item.

Curious about how other customers have used this feature? Take a look!

Keep adding landing pages

We mean it! Landing pages can transform the look and feel of your community. Since they’re highly customizable, you can also style them as you see fit. With the right tool and knowledge, they can become a gold mine for conversion for any website/community.

Open Social has various features that help make your community the best it can be. We don’t only offer standard features such as events, groups, and discussions, but we also welcome customers to suggest features that they would like to add to their community. Instead of risking the ideas and feedback of customers disappearing into a digital sea, we use a roadmap tool to collect and prioritize suggestions. Learn more about it here!